| Saturday,
Dr. Pournelle,
I want to make one point clear, both to Petronius and
this readership. I was never in favor of this invasion. I thought it a huge
mistake for reasons we are now seeing. When the war started I was a serving
officer and commmanded a company in the 4th Infantry Division for the
initial invasion and occupation. I got out and subsequently returned in the
private sector.
My experiences both then and now have, sadly, proven
this opinion to be well founded. I do however believe that now that we are
here, we have little choice but to stay. To leave now would make our
withdrawal from Vietnam seem tame by comparison. The consequences to our
military as well as out economy would be far reaching (that topic is a book
unto itself).
We also have a moral obligation to stay. Iraq had a
functioning, albeit brutal political system before we got here. We removed
it. If it had been some other force that had removed it, we would have no
such obligation, but it was our doing. To leave now would plunge this
country and possibly even the entire region into almost instantaneous chaos
and possibly reduce or cut off entirely the essential flow of oil on which
we and so much of the rest of the world depend (would that it were not so).
I can very well understand Mr Petronius' sentiment.
There are days when I feel the same way, but we cannot let it get the better
of us. For better or worse we are here and we must stay until we give back
what we took from these people; namely a government that functions.
The more thought I give it, the more promise I see in
the comparison with The Philippines, if only in terms of the timeline for
independence. It could well be enough time to train up a cadre for both the
military and civil service that puts duty before political expediency and
could hold things together, either without us or with minimal U.S.
involvement. There are good people in Iraq, people who, given time and
resources, could form a viable government. Public opinion and social norms
can be changed. Unfortunately, I do not see us trying this. We are going for
political expediency ourselves. At this stage we can only hope that the
current situation causes us to disolve the present farce of an Iraqi
government and try something a little more long term, but hope is not a
method or so the saying goes. Again, a hasty and disjointed ramble. I hope I
get my point accross clearly. Thanks again.
Sincerely,
Matt Kirchner Baghdad, Iraq
P.S. Dr. P, have you any thoughts on this matter?
I have many thoughts on these matters, but I
have said them a number of times; I am letting the arguments develop here
before I try to do an essay on what we ought to be doing over there.
The strongest
arguments for getting out NOW are generally made by Greg Cochran, who is
often sound, but whose appreciation for political nuances and consequences
are underdeveloped.
"The neo-conservatives have got us into a
pickle, and if we cut and run now we hand the jihadists a victory of great
value and magnitude." [From a previous
essay]\
Probably you're wrong. You know of course that ~5% of
the people fighting us in Iraq are non-locals. The externs are mostlyly used
as ammo in suicide bombing. We've caught quite a few trying to sneak in:
interviews and such indicate that ~85% had never showed any particular
interest in terrori or jihdaism before we invaded Iraq. We created the vast
majority of them, by our policy of aggressive war. . Now if we leave, that
inflow will slow to a trickle, because with the Great Satan out of the
picture, it's not going to be possible to get Sudanese and Saudis all
excited about internal Iraqi power struggles. Same for the people donating
money. The Sunni-tribes and Baathists will not let them run things: nor does
Zarqawi have the pwoer to prevail agaisnt them.
The Iraqis will fight over oil and who runs the show:
someone will win, and they'll sell oil. No harm to us in that scenario.
Looking at things from this narrow realistic
perspective, there's no point in staying. From a broader perspectrive, I
suppose you can argue that opur leabibng will embolden country X to perform
action Y: but I'd like to see what action Y is, and why we should care.
On the other hand. there might be big gains from
keeping the army there as long as the French did in Algeria and the
Portuguese in Angola.
Gregory Cochran
Dr. Cochran also
sends me this:
Important Distinctions
by William S. Lind
Georgie Ann Geyer, who may be America's most
perceptive international affairs columnist, wrote in the Saturday, September
17 Washington Times about a recent Washington conference concerning the mess
in the Middle East. That could, of course, have been a conference topic back
as far as the First Triumvirate, when an earlier Crassus lost his head in
the Land Between the Rivers. We can only hope we are not as close to the
loss of the republic itself as Rome was by that time.
In her column, Miss Geyer quoted at length the
remarks of former Ambassador Charles W. Freeman, Jr., who represented the
United States in Riyadh during the First Gulf War.
"The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq cost my
country thousands of lives, eroded the American military and destroyed the
Iraqi state . . . It has generated at least three different insurgencies
and, by some estimates, multiplied our enemies 10 times. Look at the
resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan -- Iraq is becoming the cause of the very
problems it was supposed to control . . ."
Moreover, he said, we have gotten mired down in
Iraq in "fourth-generation warfare," simply warfare between wildly
asymmetric forces, such as the formal and structured American military
against the footloose insurgents or guerrillas. "What fourth-generation
warfare has as its dominant character is its objective being to influence
the mind of the leader, i.e. the U.S., and to convince the leader that his
objectives are unattainable by at least reasonable amounts of force," he
continued. "This kind of warfare is one that we've never won."
Ambassador Freeman is correct in his
description of the consequences of America's invasion of Iraq. It is
America's Syracuse Expedition. Just as Sparta was happy to see Athens waste
its strength against a meaningless opponent, Syracuse, so al-Qaeda regards
our war in Iraq as a gift from Allah. Far from wanting to drive us out of
Iraq (or Afghanistan), it prays we stay in both places indefinitely, our
military bleeding from the death of one thousand cuts. [snip]
I consider Georgie Ann Geyer -- GeeGee --
to be one of the sharpest political
observers I have ever met, for what that's worth. She writes good, too.
We also have this
long note from an academic. It is worth noting that academics often do not
dare sign their work; such is the nature of the academy today. In this case
I took the liberty of removing the name, and no such inference should be
made.
Dear Jerry,
The conference paper is finished – or at least a first
draft that I will tweak later – so I thought I would go into round two on
why I think (even contra Buckley) that, knowing what we know now, it is
still worthwhile to have gone into Iraq and why we should stay there as long
as it takes to stabilize the region.
First of all, I realize that, given that I will be 40
this December maybe “young Jacobin” is a double misnomer, but having little
ones and a toddler in the house does throw off one’s perspective. There is
also something infantilizing about academia. ...
As for the particulars of why Iraq and why Empire.
First of all, as my note of yesterday put it, it seems to me we had already
accepted empire in the 40s, maybe even earlier. Even during the isolationist
20s we were deeply involved in world affairs through financial engagement
(and prior to that had been quite vulnerable to all sorts of outside
interference because of our pre-WW I debtor status). In short we elected to
join the world economy early on and have profited from that decision. It
also appears that the stock market crash and the 30s point to the wartime
and postwar wisdom of our choice to become the manager of world economic
affairs – a Europe without the Marshall Plan and the stabilizing presence of
US troops would have all too likely reverted to fascism (and there were many
in the US and Britain who had little problem envisioning De Gaulle in the
role of a new Fuhrer) or gone Communist, and then we should have been in a
real pickle. And the world economy on the whole is a good thing, even if we
had to sacrifice our quasi-autarky (and it was at best half-autarky, to
repeat, we had received a great deal of foreign investment and technology
throughout the 19th century) for a world economic role.
And it seems that like 19th century Great Britain our
economic power of necessity has become tied up with political and military
tasks. Again, here I don’t know where you would begin to untie the Gordian
knot that binds us to the world. We needed to fight World War II and the
Cold War, and we were smart enough to realize that fighting it with economic
power and through the further binding together of a global economy which we
ultimately managed was the key to victory. Oil is the fuel of the global
economy, so we couldn’t be indifferent to the Middle East. Even if we went
your route and achieved energy independence, most of our trading partners
and likely opponents would still need oil (I presume if we achieve energy
independence we are not going to share that tech breakthrough with the
Chinese). So, we would still have to be concerned about the Middle East and
its stability.
This brings us into the question of how to stabilize
the Middle East. Here I think a couple of what I take to be neo-con insights
are key, though we were doing this long before the word neo-con became a
swear word. First of all, Israel matters if only as spoiler. At the end of
the day, from strategic necessity with no reference at all to moral issues,
we have to support Israel if only because it is the only country that could
shatter the world energy economy. Israel’s nuclear weapons could destroy the
oil resources of its Muslim opponents – and my sense is that if the Arabs
were about to commit a second Shoah while the world looked on, Isrealis
wouldn’t hesitate to present the world with a high bill for that decision
via collapsing the world economy by destroying Arab oil. This seems to me to
be the fundamental strategic reality of the Middle East regardless of the
rights and wrongs of the establishment of Israel, therefore, to avoid the
kinds of life-and-death resource wars that would have to follow the
destruction of the Middle East’s oil reserves, our support for Israel (and
the ensuing hatred we receive from much of the Arab world) is the price we
pay for the sins of Europe that catapulted Zionism from a fringe movement in
Jewish life to the defining commitment of most of the world’s Jews. That is
rather hard for the Palestinians I know, but it is difficult to imagine any
arrangement in the Middle East that is going to make everybody happy anyway.
So here it is not out of any dual loyalty that some
advocate US support for Israel (and by the way, just to save a troglodyte or
two who might come upon this correspondence some time, I am not Jewish,
though as John Paul the Great said – or was it Maritain - as a Catholic I am
a spiritual Semite). At the same time, I think that the Shoah has imposed a
morale burden on the West to support Israel, and I am not surprised that
holocaust survivors and their children get a little rough when they hear
people around them calling out “death to the Jews” publishing the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion and other such dreck. My own preference for the paying
of that moral burden would be either 1) clearing out Bavaria or buying
Silesia from Poland and reestablishing a Jewish state there (with the rate
that the German population is falling there is lots of land they are not
going to be needing soon) since it was the Europeans who created the mess of
Jews believing they needed a state outside of Europe in the first place) or
2) making Israel and whatever Palestinian state comes into being part of
NATO and making the Germans establish garrisons to keep the peace and
protect Israel from any dangers they might face with their less than
defensible frontiers – and I even have a timetable for the German withdrawal
date. When there are six million more Jews in Israel than there are now
(sometime in the 27th century I think should be about right) then the
Germans can go home.
Okay, I’m sorry to have gotten off track, but if we’re
talking about American Empire we are talking about lots of interconnected
problems. First of all, in one sense I agree with Sen. Kerry, Sept. 11th
shouldn’t have changed that much, since a major terrorist attack was always
in the cards in an age where WMDs could be had by people creative enough to
obtain them. Yet, the fact that the first major attack was pulled off
without such weapons points both to the initial weakness of Al Qaeda as well
as to just how dangerous the status quo of a Middle East under unstable,
incompetent dictatorships is for us. We simply cannot afford to allow a
place as wealthy and of strategic importance to the world economy as the
Middle East, capable of producing fanatics a’la Al Qaeda to fester in its
own juices until it burst out. Sept. 11th pointed to the necessity to 1) go
on an all-out sustained set of offensives to destroy major terrorist nests
(Afghanistan) 2) changing the culture and politics of the region enough to
not be such a threat to us.
In this Iraq was not so much the greatest threat (Iran
and Saudi Arabia are probably bigger) but it was of the three, relatively
the most easy to deal with by force of arms, and the weakest link. Also, it
seems to me that those who talk of how our containment of Iraq was working
are not paying attention to how corrupt, ineffective and counterproductive
the sanctions regime had become. Sadaam was circumventing the sanctions, and
even if he didn’t have WMDs in existence, he did have illegal programs and
procurement plans. And an Iraqi nuke or two (even something low yield or
dirty) on the Saudi oil fields could also cripple the world economy.
Furthermore, the sanctions regime over a decade is likely as not the key
player in making Iraq so hard to stitch together now – Sadaam’s government
had over a decade to corrupt portions of its population via the kind of
dependency upon a brutal, centralizing state that only sustained sanctions
could foster. I believe that a great deal of the anti-Americanism we are
encountering among Iraqis was fueled by our punishing sanctions – sanctions
that harmed the whole Middle East as well as Iraqi’s innocent and
not-so-innocent civilians. To say that those could have been maintained
indefinitely seems unreal. Something needed to be done, and there was no way
short of invasion to remove Sadaam from power.
Even though Sadaam didn’t have WMDs he would never
have renounced (believably) that he would not try to acquire them (and
frankly he would have been a fool to have really renounced them – if you are
going to be a murderous butcher WMDs are the ultimate in insurance) and with
states like North Korea having lots of reasons to sell him a nuke just to
put a knife to the world’s throat, we couldn’t have afforded the kind of
“stability” that everyone seems to pine for in our pre-invasion days. We
might not have needed to have gone in at the exact time, but I seriously
doubt that we would have had more allies (Sadaam’s corruption of other
countries in the UN’s “oil for food program” assured that) and eventually we
would have had to intervene, and likely on even less favorable terms, simply
because it was a matter of time before Sadaam would have cobbled together a
truly dangerous WMD. Also, as bad as Iraq looks now, would another 5-10
years of Sadaam’s rule have made it more capable of being integrated back
into the world system, or being something other than another Somalia in a
strategic location, just waiting for Iran to swallow whole or piecemeal,
with the remnants a perfect Petri dish for Islamist fanatics (who, according
to the U of Miami’s Adeed Dawisha, Sadaam was already encouraging to come to
Iraq in the late 90s – they were there before we hit the ground).
So, I believe our presence in Iraq deterred greater
evils – of Sadaam eventually acquiring WMDs, of the further fascicization or
Islamicization of Iraqi society, and of Iraqi collapse –which we would have
had to clean up anyway. Furthermore, our ongoing presence in Iraq puts us in
a much better military position to threaten Iran, pressurize Syria and
reassure/gently coerce the Saudi’s into domestic reform while killing as
many of their domestic radicals as cross the border to play Jihad games. And
if one of your readers accuses me of showing chicken hawk courage by
believing this is worth a price that I am not personally paying, all I can
say is that one of the joys of our country being in a fight with terrorists
is that I and my little ones and friends are as desirable (maybe even more
so of) a target for our enemies as any soldier in the field. (And I haven’t
seen you make the chicken hawk insult for which I am grateful, it is just
one of those things that even some conservative opponents of the war throw
around and is a source of rage for me). From Iraq the British took down all
of their enemies in the Middle East during WWII – it was and remains key
real estate and our presence makes it more likely for us to be able to
eventually over the course of decades help (and at first, maybe forcing) the
people of the Middle East to build less toxic polities. It might be arrogant
or even Jacobin to believe we can do this, but the alternative of
disengagement doesn’t seem tenable to me.
So, the chain of causation for me is that 1) there is
a world economy and we are not getting out of it – and we need to manage it
since even if we could achieve energy independence we would still be tied to
countries dependent upon oil 2) ergo the Middle East would be a problem for
us no matter what, and our engagement there because of our ties to the world
economy is necessary (and fraught with additional peril because of our
necessary ties with Israel) and 3) the sanctions regime and Sadaam’s
containment was untenable and Iraq was relatively speaking both the easiest
target and the most economical – by occupying Iraq we are in the position to
encourage liberalization in other countries without having to fight our way
through harder targets like Iran or pushing dangerously unpredictable states
like the Saudis.
Oh and one final thing – we have encouraged people in
Iraq to believe we will stay, like we encouraged many Vietnamese, many of
whom suffered horribly when we cut and run. How many tens of thousands, or
hundreds of thousands would die if we left? And how much worse would those
who survived be under whatever would emerge. I know that our country’s
interest is paramount, but part of our interest has to include keeping
faith.
So that is the prudence of this neo-con. Empire we
have, by choice and necessity. We tried leaving Europe alone in the 20s but
couldn’t quite, because we were already tied to it. We had to go back again
to confront monstrous, global threats. We faced down worse odds (but paid a
much higher price to do it), and created a world that could integrate as
unlikely poster-children for democratic contentment as Japan and South
Korea. There are there pathologies in the Arab and Muslim world that will
cause us problems as we attempt to break or at least bend into less
dangerous configurations centuries’ old deformities. But this seems to me a
work that we have to do – energy independence is many decades away, and our
economies depend upon oil, nor do we want Muslims to rediscover the joys of
Jihad and theocracy. Again, please forgive the lecturing and any rambling.
If I had time I would write something shorter, but as is I’ve spent about
two hours on this, so I really should be off to the next thing (correcting
galley proofs for an article I’m writing . Yes, all of this writing on
subjects on which I am not an expert is probably indicative of a deep
superficiality but if my writing does not really inform at least it can be a
hopefully solid enough a straw man to provide you a few minutes of punching
pleasure and maybe even serve as a warning to myself and other neo-cons as
to how foolish we have been. And if this is the equivalent of a 200 page
poem of the type that badly dressed ill-smelling people at coffee shops try
to get you to read, my apologies. I do bathe regularly (even if I’m known to
frequent coffee shops) and I only write poetry occasionally for my wife
(which she wisely keeps in a little shoebox in the basement).
Sincerely,
"A Young Jacobin"
I have said a fair amount in private replies.
Some specific points: Energy is important. Not oil; oil is a determinant of
the price of energy, but if that price includes a $300 billion military bill
and 1,000 troopers butcher's bill, has it become too high as opposed to
developing domestic sources and building nuclear power plants?
I invite comments.
(See below)
==
Iraqui Timelines.
Jerry,
After WW2 democratic governments emerged quite quickly
in the Axis states. Germany and Italy were lapsed democracies anyway, and
the Japanese had been comprehensively defeated both in conventional war and
then in the new scientific nuclear war. The cardinal point is that peoples
of all three nations felt defeated. Similarly the South Koreans knew that
without Western armies shouldering most of the burden they would also have
been defeated. Adopting democratic government was a small price to pay for
not being slaughtered by North korea. The Iraquis do not feel defeated.
Certainly they have lost a battle, but it was a battle they feel, quite
correctly, that they couldn't win. So they have adopted the obvious strategy
of fighting a battle that holds out some prospect of success for them.
It is notable that several of your correspondents
mention 45 years as the time it took for democracy to be established in the
Philippines as this is also the time it took for hostilities to end in
Northern Ireland. Could this be a generational phenomena? Is it possible
that insurgencies fade away when the children and grandchildren of the
original insurgents begin to feel that the wrongs that were done to their
parents and grandparents are part of history and not worth risking death to
redress?
I put this idea forward tentatively. What do you
think?
John Edwards
========
Subject: global warming common sense on CNN
Dr. Pournelle,
Finally, a CNN front-page article that scoffs at the
idea that global warming (and Bush by proxy) directly caused the recent rash
of devastating hurricanes. Is there a guest editor on duty today at CNN, or
did this just sneak past the whacko filter? It sure isn't their normal
serving of enviro advocacy. Then again, marine and aviation weather folks
tend to be a bit more realistic than the average enviro enthusiast...
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/09/23/hurricane.cycle/index.html
Sean Long
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